


Love’s Proper Hue

by ArabellaStrange



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angel Sex, Angels, Canon Compliant, Demons, Ineffability, Love, M/M, References to Paradise Lost, Romance, Theology, but only vague ones, come at me Miltonists, spoilers for the tv show, yeah that's really happening
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 16:23:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19277017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArabellaStrange/pseuds/ArabellaStrange
Summary: Aziraphale debates with himself for six millennia. And wonders.





	Love’s Proper Hue

**Author's Note:**

> You better believe I went full Milton on this ship, because it needed to happen.
> 
> (PSA: the footnote jumps don't jump back, because I couldn't figure it out.)

…love refines  
The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat  
In Reason, and is judicious, is the scale  
By which to heav'nly Love thou maist ascend…  
( _Paradise Lost_ , Book 8, lines 589-592)

 

 

In the Beginning, it had been easy. Well, in theory it had been easy. Aziraphale himself hadn’t been especially interested in that sort of thing, largely because there were so many other splendid and sublime things going on at the time, and it just hadn’t seemed a top priority. But some other angels did go in for it—desire—and were quite frank about it. It was like an Earthly sunrise reaching its rosy-coloured fingers into the sky; it was like the trumpets and harps of Heaven reverberating together in a celestial chord; it was like having your cake and eating it, too. (Of course, angels in those days didn’t have cake. Angels _these_ days seldom had cake, and even seldomer enjoyed it.)

Once everything had gone so spectacularly to pieces, though, there had been rather less of that— _desire_. Raphael, for one, who himself had been positively indulgent on the matter of ethereal-and-erotic love, had spent the first Day after the Fall sulking awfully behind a newly-formed galaxy. Aziraphale had minded his own business, gliding past, without meaning to draw attention to the pangs of broken-heartedness that were echoing in that quadrant of the cosmos. They were all broken-hearted, in their own ways, to have lost so many. 

Even in the Garden, watching the humans conduct themselves in very much the same way (though, admittedly, with a bit more trouble, corporeally speaking), he had merely acknowledged the apparent accuracy of the going wisdom. And as an expression of Love, those who partook seemed strongly to endorse that verdict.

But it wasn’t until he was meeting a pair of golden, serpentine eyes for the _second_ time in as many centuries, worrying slightly that he wouldn’t be able to stomach what that certain someone beside him was horrifiedly foreseeing about all this rain, that he spared a moment to wonder. Wonder, that is, for his own sake, what he had missed out on—if indeed he had. 

He told himself what he’d told Crawly: ineffability. It was all, quite literally, for the Best.

*

Then, there was the Arrangement. From the moment Crowley had suggested it, Aziraphale had felt a tad uneasy about the Arrangement—meeting quotas, balancing each other out, being home in time for tea—but consoled himself with what slowly became the two pillars of his eternal existence.†

Firstly, of course, ineffability, which was self-explanatory insofar as you couldn’t.

Secondly, though, there was Love. Love, as a palpable force in the universe, operated in mysterious ways, Her wonders to perform. Angels, by nature, worked to, for, and with love for all things, all creatures, all hopes and dreams, all moments, just generally _all_. Love was the means and the end. And thusly, acts performed that added or amplified love on Earth (or indeed anywhere, but Aziraphale grounded himself firmly here) were Divine.

As such, his attachment to Crowley dwelt within the pale of angelic duties because, on the one hand, one could not know the Ineffable Plan; and on the other, every moment Aziraphale spent on Earth, he fell a little bit more in love with this part of Creation. There was simply so much to enjoy—books! those lovely cravats they started wearing in the late-eighteenth century! dancing! crêpes! ducks!—and all of it had a way of making one grateful, and at times awed, to be part of it all. 

Sharing these wondrous, lovable things, moreover, turned out only to increase their loveliness. And so he took Crowley to see _Hamlet_ ; joined Crowley for walks in St. James’s; drank with Crowley until they were so drunk they had to miracle themselves sober. Crowley’s eyes would catch flame with a shimmer of golden mischief, sometimes, when they encountered one another, or when Aziraphale said something deliberately—or accidentally—diverting, or during a concert or a beautiful day or an exceptionally good meal. Crowley loved this world, too, adding a net-gain to the cosmic accountancy of Love pinging about. (It also, surely, made a difference to Crowley’s ultimate fate? A demon who could love a good jazz tune [though ‘tune’ was arguably not the _mot juste_ ] and who recoiled at the worst of human injustices was, surely, ascending the ladder back towards Divine Love?) Yes, Crowley loved this world. That was, after all, why he stuck around.

And in the back of his mind, when Aziraphale wondered, or even (locally, of course, rather than generally) doubted, he told himself: ineffability, and love.

*

“Little demonic miracle of my own,” called Crowley over his shoulder, climbing gingerly down from the rubble. “Lift home?”

He stared. In his hands, he held a valise of some of his most beloved objects, astonishingly—no, Crowley was right, _miraculously_ —unscathed from their brush with Nazis (from below and, explosively, above). And yet Aziraphale stood, staring no doubt unbecomingly, at the shadowy figure marching away towards an anachronistic Bentley, and thought— _Don’t leave._

It wasn’t the first time he had craved Crowley’s company—not by at least a millennium. But it was the first time, at least consciously, that he had desired him.

Well, that was possibly inaccurate. Crowley was a tempter, by design (both his and, of course, Hers). He looked sinful because that was his lot, and because he loved the world not as an end but as a means, for pleasure’s own sake, or merely as a route out of his infernal—as it were—restlessness. So the fact that he wore his auburn hair in the most ludicrous fashions of the day, that he acknowledged the line of sartorial propriety by stepping consummately over it at every opportunity, that he drank like a sailor and terrorized his plants and sauntered positively _everywhere_ : all of this? It rather proved that desire was—to paraphrase the poet—a spectrum.

(It had been his doing, he confessed one evening after two bottles of scrumptious port, to instruct Milton on the finer points of angelic bliss. The man had been getting it _completely_ wrong, disregarding the records that Aziraphale had quite meticulously assembled to direct him towards as much of the truth of the Garden as possible without getting them in trouble. The fact that the poet had lately gone blind not only prompted Aziraphale’s compassion, but made his work that much easier, leaving manuscripts and even the odd papyrus around for the man’s admittedly overworked daughters to find. And yet when he’d read, over the poet’s shoulder one evening, the first draft of Adam’s curious, and retrospectively indiscreet, question,* Aziraphale had had no choice but to crumple the paper up and begin to sow the seeds of a more truthful account. The final passage, in his humble opinion, wasn’t half bad:

Adam—a character far afield from the actual lad, but never mind—had asked of the (equally literary) Raphael,

 _Love not the heav'nly Spirits, and how thir Love_  
_Express they, by looks onely, or do they mix_  
_Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?_

To which, as the Book would forever after report, Raphael (only slightly embellished here from the blushing fellow he remembered) replied, “with a smile that glow'd / Celestial rosie red, Loves proper hue.” 

Even given the literary adjustments Milton had made, it struck Aziraphale as an unassailable description. At least, he suspected so.)

Standing atop a mound of smouldering rubbish, clutching his books, wishing with all his heart he could see Crowley’s honey-coloured eyes even in this gloom, he wanted… Well, he wanted.

*

The next seventy years were an exercise in reasoning.

Not with Crowley, of course—there was, by and large, no reasoning with Crowley; the man was too stubborn, too decided, too mercurial, (too fast, at times,) too idiosyncratic to be reasoned with. Though sometimes it was fun to try.

But no: Aziraphale spent the greater part of the century reasoning with himself. How, he occasionally asked of his quiet bookshop upon a midnight clear, could an angel justify so long a friendship with a demon? Ineffability did not excuse wilful wrongdoing. Good and Evil existed, fundamentally, therefore one must be working at all times to thwart Hell’s lucky strokes as well as its devious, best-laid plans. Crowley was funny, and persuasive, and—broadly speaking—seductive, all traits which surely signalled danger and devilishness. Following this logic, one had to conclude that Aziraphale was kidding himself; that he was infatuated with a creature who was temptation incarnate; that he deceived no one with his flimsy attempts at excusing his own behaviour; that there would be a reckoning, eventually, and he would have Heaven to pay.

It was precisely out of this last thought that grew his only germ of hope. For in even imagining a threat to Crowley’s existence, whether by inconvenient discorporation or total annihilation, Aziraphale felt a shiver of fear the likes of which he had never known. Anything, _anything_ he could do to protect Crowley from harm was worth the cost to himself. Sacrifice was in an angel’s metaphorical blood, but usually that manifested as self-sacrifice for the Greater Good. This was for the much more particular good—namely, a colubrine good currently sporting the shape of a very attractive, very ridiculous, very dearly loved demon.

Ineffability, and love. 

If he loved Crowley enough, he could save them both. Fortunately or unfortunately, there was little he could do to stop that train from barrelling ever onwards. And the fact that Crowley liked him back was more than enough. He could be happy with that.

*

Except then the world ended, and then un-ended. The Apocalypse came and went. And on the other side of everything, there they still were, dining at the Ritz, toasting to his first tenet (“to the world!”) brimming with his second.

Almost a week later, they were back in the bookshop. It was a Saturday, well after closing but still early enough before sunrise to hear the effervescent joy of the city at night through the darkened windows. Beside him, Crowley was tipped back on the sofa, sunning himself by a candle that illuminated the garnet-coloured liquid in his dangerously-askew glass and the deep, almost turmeric hue of his slatted eyes as he watched Aziraphale hazily.

“Penny for your thoughts, angel?” he asked.

How could he possibly answer? He felt suddenly, startlingly warm, as though this were mulled wine rather than a very respectable Châteauneuf-du-pape they had replicated from the previous bottle.

“‘Easier than Air with Air,’” he recited, a little hysterically.

“What?” Crowley snickered.

“Oh, I don’t…” Aziraphale had no idea how such a thing had made its way out of his mouth. “It’s just a poem.”

“Ah,” nodded Crowley a little wobbily, as though that explained everything. “Nonsense, of course, poems. Mostly just yammering about moonlight and death and plums.”

“I’ll have you know I contributed to this poem!” said Aziraphale defensively, sliding a little farther towards the opposite arm of the sofa in indignation.

“Did you?” replied Crowley, surprised.

“Oh,” stammered Aziraphale, who once again sat aghast at the sounds his own tongue and vocal chords and other corporeal instruments were producing in spite of any volition to be talking. And it kept happening! “I—yes, well—I, I merely suggested—but i-it’s not very interesting. Rather too old for you, my dear, and, er, very dry.”

“Too old for me?” smirked Crowley, with that achingly familiar twist to his lips. Aziraphale _wondered_. 

“Too old for your _taste_ ,” he managed to correct, sounding almost distressingly sober to his own ears. “Milton.”

“Ugh, no, not _him_ ,” groaned Crowley. He kicked his feet up on the table, all legs (a celestial joke, no doubt), as though he didn’t know it drove Aziraphale mad when he did that. “An awful, grumpy, bitter old man.”

Aziraphale was momentarily glad that the alluring warmth that had been animating Crowley’s face had kindly taken a minute’s tea break to leave him with a more contemptuous, uninterested expression.

“And don’t go off at me for criticising a man with a disability,” Crowley added, wagging a finger in not so much a shake as a dance. “Even people with disabilities can be tossers just as much as the next humans, and that bloke made those girls’ lives Hell for them.”

“One might have expected you to approve,” Aziraphale pointed out, attempting to seize this line of conversation.

“ _No_ ,” sulked Crowley, rolling his golden eyes and taking a further sulk to sip his wine. “That’s not my style.”

“No,” agreed Aziraphale softly. “I shouldn’t think it was.”

Crowley’s mouth quirked appreciatively.

“Hang on!” Crowley interrupted himself, nearly spluttering his drink. “You said—just now—you said, you contributed! And you quoted from it! Let’s hear it!”

“No, I really don’t think—”

“C’ _monnnn_ ,” urged Crowley, sitting forward and imploring with every fibre of his not-inconspicuous being. “Recite it for us, then!”

“I don’t want to,” Aziraphale begged, knowing he sounded petulant—but at least petulant was better than desperate, frantic, utterly unprepared to imagine what Crowley would do to hear such things tumble from him rather than a more—a less—someone else! But part of Aziraphale, the part that had perhaps never stopped hearing the muted sobs from a suddenly lonely hub of a galaxy, wondered and wondered _and wondered_. And besides, they were on their own now. _On their own side_ , Crowley had said after the world ended, as though that was any less terrifying than before.

“Just onsssssse,” Crowley hissed, with an ironical smile, as though he could tease Aziraphale—tempt him—into a little harmless mischief. 

_Temptation incarnate_ , warned the one side.

 _Ineffability_ , murmured the other, _and love_.

“All right,” whispered Aziraphale. “Just once.”

It took him a moment to search his memory, tinged with alcohol and the clamour of nerves that was rioting in his brain. But eventually he located it, blushing himself slightly as he recalled the lines,º but, well…

He steadied himself. His heart was thundering in his chest. He stared down at Crowley’s crossed feet where they were propped on the coffee table.

“... _Let it suffice thee that thou know'st_  
_Us happie, and without Love no happiness._  
_Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy'st_  
_(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy_  
_In eminence, and obstacle find none_  
_Of membrane, joynt, or limb, exclusive barrs:_  
_Easier then Air with Air, if Spirits embrace,_  
_Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure_  
_Desiring; nor restrain'd conveyance need_  
_As Flesh to mix with Flesh, or Soul with Soul._  
_But I can now no more…_  
_Be strong, live happie, and love_ …”

Outside, people kept going by, laughing and calling to one another, so maybe the wide aura of embarrassment sinking around Aziraphale was perceptible to him only.

After another terribly long minute of near perfect silence, Crowley simply said, “Well.”

“I think I, er, left a bit out, at—at the end there, somewhere,” Aziraphale muttered. “Something about sunset, and er… leaving.”

“Bit out-of-character, for you,” Crowley hummed, as though Aziraphale hadn’t spoken. "Bit... racy, really."

“Well, yes, but, any specific quibbles you might have about the—I suppose, the finer points of the matter, you can attribute to poetic licence,” scolded Aziraphale. This wasn’t what he wanted. Crowley was just… sitting there. He hadn’t moved, had barely breathed except to tease, because he liked Aziraphale. He was his best friend. That was so much. It was nearly enough. He could try to be happy with that, again.

He wanted, very unusually, for Crowley to go home. To leave Aziraphale to sweep up the shattered fragments of his hopes and try to get his angelic dignity back together by the morning.

“And you… advised him from personal experience?” Crowley asked.

Aziraphale’s skin prickled, a distinctly corporeal hazard and one that he had never been able to bear with any (except Her perpetual) grace. “Of course not,” he snapped. “I was merely advising him in a… an informational capacity. So as not to spread misinformation.”

“I see,” was all Crowley replied. 

“Yes, I’m sure you do,” huffed Aziraphale, while his chest seemed to be thumping with embarrassment and disappointment and… _All in their own ways_. “Now, it’s very late, and I need to be awake first thing—”

He was just about to jump to his feet, but a hand struck out and grabbed his. He stopped abruptly, still seated—he hadn’t even managed to move.

“Angel,” murmured Crowley. 

It was unfair, in so many ways, that Crowley’s unshaded eyes were so beautiful. 

“I could never have… It would never have been like that,” Aziraphale admitted, gazing back hungrily, though for what he could hardly say, “not a bit, unless it was with you.”

The only warning he had was the split, infinitesimally small, impossibly unending moment in which those gorgeous golden eyes slid down to land on his mouth.

Crowley kissed him. He kissed back.

*

Significantly later, beneath soft sheets warmed by skin that had been somehow disregarded as literally immaterial and yet shudderingly, achingly present by turns for the last few hours, they lay curled together in Crowley’s bed.‡ _Cake_ , supplied Aziraphale's brain, foggily. What exactly it meant by that didn’t bother Aziraphale just now. Instead, he focussed and studied Crowley’s face up close some more.

"Well," said Crowley, not for the first time that night.

"Indeed," Aziraphale agreed. "Rather less.. messy than I feared."

"Mm," Crowley smirked, looking far too smug and contented, as though basking in Aziraphale's awkwardness.

"I just _mean_ ," he went on, narrowly stopping himself from rolling his own eyes, "that it was..." But he didn't have words. It was impossible to describe the renewed appreciation he had for his body, for Crowley's body, for the tumbling, cascading welter of sensation of not being sure where his body ended and Crowley's began, of losing track of the fluidity of the boundaries of their corporeal and interdimensional forms and simply sinking into the aura of heat and safety and adoration that unmade and then remade him. "Paradoxical," he offered, at last.

“Poetic licence?” Crowley inquired. The smirk didn't appear to be going anywhere. 

But Aziraphale smiled a little. “Evidently less than I imagined.”

“Oh, you imagined it?” Crowley prodded, grinning fully now.

Absent-mindedly, Aziraphale was slowly stroking along the smooth, sinuous, inky muscle of Crowley’s wing, partly visible as it spilled elegantly behind him. “My dear, given that I realised I was in love with you the better part of a century ago, I was bound to imagine it once or twice.”

Crowley’s face did something complicated, something that made Aziraphale blink nervously.

“I’m sorry if that’s distressing to you,” Aziraphale told him, feeling the tension that had jolted down his body everywhere they were tangled together.

“A century,” he scoffed. “Angel, I’ve loved you for _so_ much longer than that.”

He—his body short-circuited, though perhaps that was not supposed to be a feature that happened to bodies. A vivid shock went through him, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of its doing so, and Aziraphale struggled to find his voice.

“I wish I had known,” Aziraphale finally said, thickly. His hands went up to feel Crowley’s face, his smooth cheeks and sharp jaw. Under his left index finger, the small, tattoo-like mark that harkened back across time squirmed at his touch.

“Would it have mattered?” Crowley bit out. His tone was low and harsh, but he seemed angriest with himself, fists clenched and eyes ducked down where Aziraphale couldn’t see them. “If I had said to you, in Paris, or Rome, or—or standing on the Eastern Gate, as it started to rain, ‘My angel, how would you like to spend eternity with me?’”

“We _have_ been spending it together,” Aziraphale whispered. “And it has been happiest of times.”

Crowley finally looked up, and Aziraphale brushed his thumbs across Crowley’s anxious cheeks. Then, with something like determination coming into his face, he pushed forward to roll Aziraphale onto his back beneath him, gazing down into his eyes, his own honey-toned ones flashing. “Oh, I’m just getting started.”

Dawn spilled light gently across the sky, golden.

 

*

 

† Strictly speaking, because of ineffability’s… well, _ineffability_ —, these were also probably always already the two pillars of his and the cosmos’s eternal existence. But that was neither here nor there (because everywhere).  
* Kent R. Lehnhof argues that even “[b]efore the Fall, Adam and Eve possess complete integrity of self. Their union, like that of the angels, is that of ‘Pure with Pure’,” suggesting that sexuality existed even within Eden, and that it was not erotic love but rather shame, doubt, and improper knowledge that came to mark post-lapsarian intimacy: see “‘Nor turnd I weene’: _Paradise Lost_ and Pre-Lapsarian Sexuality,” _Milton Quarterly_ 34.4 (October 2000): pp.67-83.  
º As Karma deGruy has pointed out, contra no less influential theologian than St. Augustine, angels do blush, and for perfectly Divine reasons. See “Desiring Angels: The Angelic Body in _Paradise Lost_ ,” _Criticism_ 54.1 (Winter 2012): pp.117-149.  
‡ One of the benefits to celestial bliss of which Milton was not aware included the ability to transport oneself and one’s beloved halfway across a city from a flat without a suitable bed to a different flat that contained one.

**Author's Note:**

> Those citations are real--even the scholar's name. Angel sex is a recognised component of Milton studies: just ask your friendly local Miltonist. Other references thrown in there because, like most fanfiction, this is a panegyric for the fandom (and the work I'm actually supposed to be doing) and I figured, why not. [*Update: [here is a Drive folder with sources](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1OwIWtI1wDyS4OEkBWNJz8nzDfLXIiO_C?usp=sharing). Go wild.]
> 
> As ever, please [let me know](https://arabella-strange.tumblr.com/ask) if you see any typos or errors: I want to fix them!


End file.
